This invention relates to apparatus for determining the shape and orientation of articles as they pass an inspection station.
A typical use of the apparatus is for determining if cobs of corn that are being conveyed toward a kernel stripper or cutter head are oriented such that their tips or small diameter ends are all leading and their large diameter or stem ends are all trailing as the cobs enter the cutter. It should be evident, however, from the description of an illustrative embodiment of the invention which will be given later that the invention may be used for determining the shape and orientation of various vegetables such as cucumbers, turnips and carrots and other non-food articles, too. For example, the invention could be used to properly orient articles that must enter a wrapping or packaging machine in a particular attitude.
In the food preserving industry, the corn kernels are usually cut from the cobs before the kernels are canned or fast frozen. The type of cutter heads most commonly used are those which are obtainable from FMC Corporation. These heads have several rotating knives which provide a central opening in which the corn cobs enter for the cutting or stripping operation. The head performs more efficiently if the tip ends, that is, the small ends of the corn cobs enter the cutter first. Hence, it has been customary to have workers place cobs of corn manually onto a conveyor chain that feeds to the cutter head. The cobs are always oriented by the workers so that the cob tips or more tapered and smaller diameter ends will be leading. This is an extremely tedious task as is well known. A principal aspect of the present invention is to provide apparatus for identifying the cobs which are wrongly oriented and for controlling a device which orients the cobs or any article properly. It is self-evident that arranging the cobs in the proper orientation automatically would be highly desirable.
It has been proposed to pass corn cobs along a plurality of closely adjacent spring biased fingers which, by contacting or not contacting parts of the cob along its length, produce information that is indicative of the orientation of the cobs. Such as sensor could be used in with a device that turns misoriented cobs end-for-end in response to information signals from the sensor. Contact sensing, however, is viewed as being inherently unreliable and insufficiently fast because movement of mechanical parts are involved.